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NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. May 03, 2019

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NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. May 03, 2019 NCSEJ WEEKLY TOP 10 Washington, D.C. May 03, 2019 U.S. Special Envoy to Combat Anti-Semitism Elan Carr to Visit Ukraine Ukrinform, May 1, 2019 https://www.ukrinform.net/rubric-polytics/2691816-us-special-envoy-to-combat-antisemitism-elan-carr-to-visit- ukraine.html May 1-15, United States Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism Elan Carr will travel to Israel and European countries, including Ukraine. The U.S. Department of State said this in its statement released on April 30. From May 1-5, Special Envoy Carr will be a member of the U.S. delegation attending the International March for the Living, held in Poland and Israel. The March for the Living is an annual event to educate participants on the history of the Holocaust and the roots of prejudice, intolerance, and hatred. Special Envoy Carr will travel to Kyiv (Ukraine) to address the Kyiv Jewish Forum on May 6. He will also meet with Ukrainian government officials and Jewish community representatives. From May 7-9, Elan Carr will travel to Warsaw, Poland and Budapest, Hungary, where he will meet with government officials, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and Jewish community leaders. On May 12, Special Envoy Carr will travel to Belgium. In Brussels, he will meet with Belgian government officials, local NGOs, and Jewish community leaders. Belarus Building Site Yields the Bones of 1,214 Holocaust Victims By Andrew Higgins The New York Times, April 27, 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/27/world/europe/belarus-holocaust-mass-grave.html Tatyana Lakhay, a cheerful fitness instructor in the Belarus city of Brest, returned to her apartment after a morning exercise class when she glanced out a window and came face to face with the horrors of the Holocaust. “My God! What is going on? Something is obviously not right,” Ms. Lakhay, 26, recalled thinking as she watched a ghoulish spectacle unfold on the building site below. Instead of the construction workers who for weeks had been preparing the foundations for a new luxury apartment project, soldiers in masks and gloves were pulling human skeletons from the earth. So many bones were coming out of the ground, she said, it was immediately clear this was no ordinary crime scene. Seeking to calm the furor, Mayor Alexandr Rogachuk of Brest told local journalists last month that the city, the scene of ferocious fighting in both world wars and earlier conflicts, had been built atop the unmarked graves of countless unknown war victims. “Everyone here is a sinner in this respect,” he said. “We are all walking on bodies,” While it was known that the building site might contain “a few dozen” bodies, the mayor said, “nobody expected such a large number.” Jews made up about half Brest’s population of around 60,000 in 1941, and were thought to have been killed mostly in a secluded forest 70 miles east. They had been taken there by rail in an early test of logistics for Hitler’s “Final Solution.” Evgeny Rosenblat, a historian who has studied the murder of the city’s Jews during World War II, said it had long been known that the Nazis also carried out massacres in the center of Brest. Still, he said, he was surprised by the large number of remains found on the building site. Just how and when those people died are not known, as few witnesses survived. Most of the remains on the site, Mr. Rosenblat said, were probably of Jews who had initially managed to hide or flee but were then captured after the Nazi’s destroyed Brest’s Jewish ghetto in October 1942. He said at least two other sites in the city might also contain many bodies. By the time the Soviet army reconquered Brest in 1944, only a handful of Jews remained. One of them was Menachem Begin, a future Israeli prime minister, who had survived because he was arrested by Stalin’s secret police before the Nazi invasion and sent to a Soviet prison camp. None of the few hundred Jews living in Brest today lived there before the war. As well as stirring horrific historical memories, the mass grave on the building site for an luxury housing development has ignited a very contemporary debate about corruption, abuse of power and lingering anti- Semitism in a country that has been ruled for 25 years by the same iron-fisted leader, President Alexander Lukashenko. Regina Simonenko, the leader of a local Jewish group called Brisk, the old Yiddish name of Brest, complained that municipal authorities should never have issued a building permit for the site and are now rushing to bury the uncovered bones without a proper investigation of whose remains they are and what other bodies might lie nearby. Local officials, Ms. Simonenko said, were focused on celebrating the 1,000th anniversary of Brest’s founding and wanted to keep the discovery of the mass grave quiet. They acknowledged it, she said, only after Ms. Lakhay and others began posting videos on social media of the site piled with bones. Alla Konduk, a local official, denied any desire to hide what had been found, saying that a special forensic military unit had been called in on Jan. 17, immediately after construction workers told city authorities about the remains. Ms. Konduk said that the foundations of the planned project would not touch the mass grave and that construction, halted since January, would soon resume. This has infuriated Irina Lavrovskaya, an architect and a preservation campaigner. She started an online petition demanding that construction on the site be halted completely and that it be fenced off and turned into a “memorial park” for Jews murdered by the Nazis. She also appealed to Belarus’s prosecutor general to investigate whether rules governing construction in historic areas had been violated. An Italian company had originally planned to develop the site but dropped out. A murky and little known Belarus company, Pribuzhsky Kvartal, took over the project. The prosecutor sent a letter to Ms. Lavrovskaya this month saying that the construction contract had now been canceled so there was no need to investigate any irregularities. Ms. Lavrovskaya said it was obvious from the start that the site might contain bones, recalling how, as a young girl in the 1950s, she had lived in the area and seen human remains being removed from an earlier construction site adjacent to the recently uncovered mass grave. “There was a terrible smell in the whole neighborhood,” she said. “It was so awful it was impossible to hide.” Unlike in neighboring Lithuania and Ukraine, where locals often welcomed the Nazis as liberators from Moscow’s rule and sometimes joined in the murder of Jews, the people of Belarus rarely collaborated in Hitler’s slaughter and have little to be ashamed of. Yet, as the most Soviet of the countries that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Belarus has clung to the view of Stalin and his successors that Jews were just one of many groups of Soviet citizens killed by the Nazis and do not deserve special recognition. “They are anti-Semites by inertia,” Ms. Lavrovskaya said. A Soviet-era memorial at Bronnaya Gora, the forest killing field east of Brest, pays tribute to “50,000 Soviet citizens and citizens of other countries” slaughtered there by the Nazis but does not mention that nearly all were Jews. A second monument in the forest refers to “citizens of Jewish nationality from the Soviet Union” who were killed. Brest officials do not deny the suffering of Jews, but bristle at demands they recognize the Holocaust’s unique nature. “Why do they demand separate memorials? said Ms. Konduk. “All victims are equal.” Ms. Konduk said that after discussions with Brest’s rabbi, it had been agreed that the all the bones recovered recently would be reburied on May 21 in the Jewish section of a municipal cemetery in the north of the city. Efim Basin, a local Jewish activist, said he disagreed with calls by Ms. Simonenko and some others that reburial be put off to give time for experts to take DNA samples and build up a genetic database of those killed. “These people are dead. Let them rest,” he said. Whether construction on the site continues, he added, is of little importance. “I would never buy an apartment in this building. But if some idiots want to live in this place that is their affair.” As Survivors Dwindle, US Still Pursues Holocaust Restitution By Ron Kampeas JTA, May 1, 2019 https://www.jta.org/quick-reads/as-survivors-dwindle-us-still-pursues-holocaust-restitution The number of survivors may be dwindling, but the State Department’s envoy on Holocaust issues says the issue of restitution still lingers. Thomas Yazdgerdi, the special envoy for Holocaust issues, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Wednesday that he is preparing a report to Congress due in November that assesses what countries in Europe have done to complete their obligation to restore properties stolen during the Holocaust. The report was mandated by a 2018 law, the Justice for Uncompensated Survivors Today Act passed unanimously in both chambers of Congress. Restitution can be made to communities in the absence of survivors, Yazdgerdi said. “What do you do with property where the whole family, a Jewish family, was murdered in the Holocaust?” he asked. “The best practice is to set up a foundation, use the proceeds of that property to help Holocaust survivors that are living in that country and use some of that money to promote and revitalize Jewish life in that country.” The same is true of synagogues and other communal properties that were stolen and remain unrestituted, he said.
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